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Cultured Key Lime Pie Frozen Yogurt’s Many Muses

Posted May 6, 2014 by aaronbeck

We like to share everything about how our ice creams come to life. Doing so, we hope, connects you a little more to the ice cream.

But, how an ice cream tastes and how it was made are just two facets of the built-from-the-ground-up process at Jeni’s. In addition to procuring the best ingredients and prepping them by hand, we also create (and install) all of our scoop shop decor in-house.

Step into our shops today and you’ll see on the walls some new eye candy celebrating the arrival of our newest flavor Cultured Key Lime Pie Frozen Yogurt. The images comprise a curated collection that originally adorned the Jeni’s Splendid Art + Design Team’s “Visual Mood Board” this past winter during the development of Cultured Key Lime Pie Frozen Yogurt.

If you haven’t been in a shop since the flavor’s release, here’s what it looks like:

We kicked off the Cultured Key Lime Pie Frozen Yogurt campaign as we do every campaign: with a mood board. Here’s how the process worked: Each member of the creative team compiled a concise collection of inspired images that visually embodied the spirit of the flavor. From there we edited, re-arranged, figure out what was missing, and add to it.

Our goal was, as it always is, to create a visual manifestation of what the flavor tastes like. In Cultured Key Lime Pie Frozen Yogurt’s case, tart, tangy, fresh, and salty all come to life through acidic colors, jolts of geometric shapes, images infused with sun-flares, and images that exude carefreeness and pure joy.

Kelsey McClellan, Jeni’s photographer, says:

“Each person on the team had a unique idea of what the flavor’s story was and each person is definitely represented by the objects on the walls in shops. Our goal, as always, was to convey emotion and activate the senses. Drawing inspiration from the bright, vibrant colors of Miami, the Caribbean, and the South, but also—because of the pie element in the flavor—the Midwest.”

“The pieces on the Visual Mood Board evoked the feeling of being by the beach—and sitting at an old picnic table covered in a vinyl table cloth with a loud pattern while eating Grandma’s famous Key lime pie.”

Beach scene by Kelsey’s Uncle Skip, made in the early ’60s on the Gulf shores of Texas:

The image of Jeni is a selfie she snapped on her recent family trip to Florida:

The orange and black Saab used to sit on the street near Kelsey’s former home in Clintonville, just north of the Ohio State University campus.

“The house had three cars covered and parked year round in the tiny drive-way,” Says Kelsey. “But one day I walked by and they were all uncovered, soakin’ up some sun. You can see the other two parked on the street behind Saab in the background”:

Kelsey’s palm tree photo was taken near Baker Beach in San Francisco and printed an over-size, black and white, thin paper—almost tissue-paper-thin—to give the image a gauzy, dreamy look. “The palm trees there are huge and elderly looking.”

What can we say? Jeni loves old Van Halen—maybe not as much as she loves Foreigner, but all the same, Jeni loves old Van Halen, and especially “Diamond” David Lee Roth’s line, which Jeni scribbled and tacked to the Visual Mood Board: